Group: Donor Transaction and Contact System

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On the FSF's High Priority Projects list there is a call for the creation of a donor transaction and contact system. This section of the wiki is to help organize our efforts to either find, customize, or create such a system.

Please add yourself, below, if you are interested in helping with any aspect of this high-priority project.

Feel free to add new projects. Help draft specifications for a new project or to help guide the customization of an existing system.

People

FLOSS Foundations Effort

FLOSS Foundations, which is a loosely organized, large group of FLOSS-related Non-Profit organizations, have started an email list to discuss creation of new non-profit management software: http://lists.flossfoundations.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations-software

There are also notes on this topic from their last annual meeting: http://flossfoundations.org/notes-floss-foundations-oscon-2008

Existing projects

Apache OFBiz

http://ofbiz.apache.org/


CiviCRM

http://civicrm.org/

CiviCRM is a Constituent Relationship Management system.

  • Language: PHP
  • License: GNU AGPL 3

Features

  • CiviContribute is an online fundraising and donor management component which enables you to track and manage contributions to your organization. It also allows you to quickly and easily create customized web pages to accept online donations. CiviContribute is fully integrated with CiviCRM, and creates or updates contact and donation records for all contributions, eliminating data entry time and errors.
    • CiviContribute is not without bugs, but one nice thing is that the developers are quite responsive on both the forum and their issue tracker. A new version (2.1) was also recently released, which surely improves many things. It might be worth poking around the demo site.
  • CiviEvent provides integrated online event registration and management for paid and free events. It allows you to quickly and easily create customized web pages to for event registration, and then track participants. CiviEvent is fully integrated with CiviCRM, and creates or updates contact records for all event participants, eliminating data entry time and errors.
  • CiviMail is a robust mass-mailing component which allows you to engage your constituents with personalized email blasts and newsletters.
    • It should be noted that the recommended CiviMail configuration requires a rather non-standard setup involving an MTA (Postfix), Amavis and a CiviMail SOAP interface. While this setup seems to work okay, there is something slightly unsettling about mass mailing software that requires some interaction between a virus scanner and a SOAP interface.
  • CiviMember provides flexible membership management for your organization, along with convenient online signup and renewal.
  • CiviPledge handles offline and self-service pledges

General

  • Creating custom templates is easy and well separated from the main code.
  • The code is somewhat convoluted, so be prepared to have some difficulties debugging (should it be necessary). However, as mentioned above, response from the developers is quite fast at the CiviCRM forum.
  • The web interface is somewhat sluggish.
  • Anyone interested in discussing Creative Commons' experience with CiviCRM can do so on the discussion page of this article or by emailing me directly, but the more that stays on the wiki the better.

OffstageArts

http://www.offstagearts.org

License: GNU GPLv3

Demo: See here for an on-line demo: http://offstagearts.org/?q=tryit

Programmer and User Documentation: http://offstagearts.org/?q=docs

Description:

OffstageArts provides integrated management functionality for arts and other non-profit organizations. It integrates all organizational functions in one place: development, marketing, event management, school and ticket sales.

OffstageArts is a Free Software application, licensed under the GPLv3. All components it uses, along with the development tools needed to create it, are also free software. No commercial licenses are required to run or develop OffstageArts.

OffstageArts is implemented as a two-tier client-server database application, with some customer-focused web components planned. The client is deployed in a zero-configuration manner via Java Web Start; the server is normally hosted over the Internet. This provides the benefits of traditional web applications, with a richer user interface, additional deployment flexibility and easier server management.

It is assumed that volunteer or commercial technical consultants will work with individual organizations to manage, deploy, customize and provide support for OffstageArts. Customizations to fit an organization's exact data needs are designed to be seamless and cheap to implement. The system has been designed so that all support work may be accomplished efficiently off-site.

Grace

Grace Contribution Manager

The Grace Contribution Manager handles the tracking of contributions and donors for a non-profit organization. As contributions come in for particular funds, the contribution is recorded along with the donor's information. Grace also handles the printing of receipts & reports and facilitates common administrative operations like bank deposits and exporting of data to an accounting package.


Features

  • Create a deposit and enter contributions into that deposit.
  • Multiple line items (recipients) possible for each contribution.
  • Streamlined data entry and finalizing of a deposit.
  • Create multiple funds to receive contributions.
  • Print receipts for donors.
  • Print reports for fund owners (or output to PDF).
  • Export to external accounting system.
  • Notify fund owners by email of contributions.
  • Multiple, concurrent users with extensive logging.
  • Copy deposits for easy re-entry of repeated sets of contributions.
  • Rapid, extensive search for deposits, contributions, and donors.
  • Runs on 32-bit and 64-bit GNU/Linux (tested on Debian and Ubuntu)

Rapport

Rapport is a donor and volunteer management application (in progress). The ultimate goal for Rapport is create a system suitable for use as a hosted service, or installable on an end-user's server. Of course, it will provide a variety of features for managing contacts, recording donations, sending email, etc.

ON NGO Membership

This project aims at creating web based member management software for NGOs, based on Grok and PostgreSQL. The functionality will, at first, include handling of member's addresses, contact options, a variety of member stati, and possibly payment of membership fees.

In the medium term, self-service and functionality like campaign support are desired.

The project will also contain a collection of programs specific for use by the FFII, which may or may not be useful to the general public.

]project-open[

]po[ is a Web-based ERP/Project Management software for organizations with 2-2000 users. ]po[ integrates areas such as CRM, sales, project planning, project tracking, collaboration, timesheet, invoicing and payments.

Features

  • Project templates, planning, tracking, & reporting
  • Risk Management, finance, profit & loss, project invoicing
  • Financial reporting, accounting export
  • Customer contacts
  • Interaction History
  • Online Web Registration
  • Customer tracking & classification
  • Customer Status Engine
  • Employee Payroll, skills, recruiting, portraits
  • Automatic Invoices

Compier

License: MPL

Compiere encompass ERP functionalities, but in order to avoid the duplication of information and the need for synchronisation, it's organized in a different way. Compiere modules are: Quote-to-Cash, Requisition-to-Pay, Customer relationship management, Partner Relations Management, Supply Chain Management, Performance Analysis, Warehouse, Double-entry Book-keeping, Work-flow-Management and Web Store.

ERP5

ERP5 is a free Enterprise Resource Planning system based on the Zope application server. It is mainly developed in the Python programming language.

License: GPL


OpenTaps

Version 1.0 was released in March 2008 and is a complete enterprise application platform that brings together ERP, CRM, business intelligence, and mobility integration. Opentaps 1.0 includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Enterprise Resource Planning; Financials and Accounting, Inventory, Warehouse, and Manufacturing; Purchasing; integrated Online and Point Of Sales stores. It also includes tools for integration with external applications, and mobile devices are supported via SOAP, and XML-RPC.


SugarCRM

Need more info about Sugar.

GNU Calendula

The Calendula project is still in the planning stage; a requirements document and other background information are available through CVS.


Specifications/Major-issues/desired features

One of the biggest issues facing non-profits is the ability to do large mailings. This often requires a lot of RAM, bandwidth, and server space. This is something most non-profits can not afford. Therefore, when taking into consideration the software used for contacting donors, we should also consider systems/web-services that will allow non-profits to pool hardware resources to do mailings together. Many non-profits are seduced into using proprietary network services due to these kind of cost/space/bandwidth constraints.

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